Dreams—windows to the mind

In the first of our two-part series on dreaming we explore the latest science about this altered state of consciousness, how mobile phones can be used to research and manipulate the nature of our dreams, and how our dreams may be a therapeutic tool providing valuable insight to our inner selves.

Joining in? We'd love to hear from you about your most powerful dream experience. Do dreams play a part in your life?

Transcript

James Pagel: It's easier to prove that there is a function for dreaming than it is to prove that there is a clear function for sleep.

Ilana Laps: The logical, linear, rational part of our brain is powered down when we're dreaming, but everything to do with our emotional life and our motivation and our memory banks are actually wide awake.

Richard Wiseman: We wondered whether we could control the dreams of millions of people around the world.

Lynne Malcolm: How rich is your dream world? I recently returned from several weeks of travel, and I can tell you that every single night in my dreams was like going to the movies. Sometimes wild and sometimes quite mundane images and stories took over my sleeping mind.

For centuries our dreams have intrigued us. For some people dreams have spiritual or religious significance, and to others they act as 'windows to the mind'. Over the next couple of weeks we'll explore the science and the mystery of this tantalising dream space.

Dr James Pagel has a clinical sleep practice at the University of Colorado and has studied sleep and dreams for over 40 years. He says that with the development of brain scanning technologies our neuro-scientific understanding of dreams is currently going through a huge and exciting change. To begin with it's now known that the type of dream you have varies according to the stage of sleep you are in.

James Pagel: The dreams that you have when you're falling asleep, what we call hypnagogic dreams, are very visual, they don't have much story, they can be extremely intense, they can in some patients even be almost real, like hallucinations. The dreams of REM sleep tend to be these long, story-like narrative events that are organised very close to waking with a structure that sometimes looks a lot like waking. The dreams of stage two or light sleep are kind of rambling, unfocused regurgitations of the day's waking activities. And the dreams of deep sleep are what some people call dreamless sleep, or these incredibly bizarre, strange events coming from deep in the mind that sometimes are more like sleepwalking, confusional arousals, night terrors, extreme emotions, extreme body sensations and intense but very undeveloped thought process. Lucid dreaming is at the edge of sleep. It's on this transition between sleep and waking.

Lynne Malcolm: And more about that intriguing lucid dream state next week. But today, dreams in our everyday lives.

James Pagel mentioned REM sleep. During this phase the eyes are rapidly moving but the body remains very still. It has been a widely held view that dreams only occur during this REM phase, but James Pagel says that's not quite right, and our understanding is slowly shifting.

James Pagel: The big change that's happening right now has been the dropping out of the concept that REM sleep and dreaming are the same thing. The interesting thing is there was never any proof, there was never any evidence that REM sleep was dreaming. It was based on a few people; they woke up during REM sleep and they said they were dreaming. Of course the studies were always there saying that if you woke people up who weren't in REM sleep they would also say that they were dreaming, and that dream recall is just as frequent from some of the other sleep stages, like sleep onset. So what had happened is that for many years, instead of studying dream reports or what people would describe as a dream, everyone looked at REM sleep.

Lynne Malcolm: So the philosophical implication of equating the state of REM sleep with dreaming is really that the brain and the mind are one and the same, isn't it?

James Pagel: Yeah, that's where we are these days. Our concept of what a dream is is really something that defines some of our basic philosophy of mind. If you look back 150 years, it was quite obvious to the entire society and the entire world that dreams were something that came from outside. They came from God, or the Devil if they were nightmares, and people used those dreams to found religions, to make assessments of the future. Dreams were viewed as something totally different than they are today.

At the time of Freud, maybe 110 years ago, was really the first concept that these dreams might reflect something coming from inside us. And in that era, almost everyone was a Cartesian, in that body was one thing and mind was another. But it was around 1960, with the discovery of REM sleep and then the development of these neuro-consciousness theories like activation synthesis, that really all of us came to believe that whatever happened in the brain defined the mind and the mind had to happen somewhere in the brain. And it's interesting now, with the kind of basis for that perspective pulled out and all of us believing that brain and mind are the same, where does that leave us?

Lynne Malcolm: You describe dreams as 'links tunnelling between the body and the mind'. What do you mean by this?

James Pagel: The interesting things about dreams is that they have a component which is apparently not biologic. There are characteristic components of each dream. There is the visual components, the images we see. There are the memories, all of which somehow are in our system, that we've incorporated into our dream stories. And then there are emotions. And those three components of the dream clearly have biologic structures and markers, neuro-anatomy, electrophysiology, neurochemistry, things we very well understand.

But there are components of dream which are mind-based. In other words, we use our dreams in creative process, we use our dreams in art, we use our dreams in understanding in ways that we don't attain with conscious thought. These appear to be mind-based correlates that we can see within a dream. Now, most dreams may not show those. Most dreams are reflections of our waking life. But some dreams can be very special.

Ilana Laps: One particular dream I remember. I was considering moving to another country to study their work on trauma, and while I was there doing research I had a dream. It was a very sunny dream and I was at a conference for nurses, and it all seemed very positive until suddenly one by one all the nurses' eyes became black and haunted, and the earth started to give way beneath me. So there was a real twist in the plot, which is one of the things that we look for in dreams. And when I woke up and I did the dream work, I felt very strongly that it was a warning dream, letting me know that that would not be a healing place for me to work. So I changed my plans.

Lynne Malcolm: Psychotherapist Ilana Laps, and we'll hear from her later about how she uses her clients' dreams to fast-track therapy.

Dreaming and creativity are very often linked, and this interested James Pagel. He had conducted studies on successful creative individuals, but noticed that not much research had been done on larger groups. He decided to investigate how people use their dreams, in a general population in Hawaii.

James Pagel: We found that most people use their dreams in relationship, in decision-making, in responding to stress. And so we had developed a pattern that most people will report that they use their dreams in their waking behaviour. Now, when I came back to the mainland, my wife was working as a…she's a program coordinator at Sundance Film Labs, and we gave the same questionnaire to the group of artists, directors and screenwriters working at the Film Lab and they blew all my scales. It was kind of amazing how much they used dreams in their work. It was also amazing that there was a difference based on individuals' creative interest, in other words directors used their dreams in responding to change in stress, screenwriters used their dreams in decision-making, and actors just used their dreams across the board. No-one uses their dreams like an actor.

We came back and used the same scale at our sleep lab, and rated people's creative interests. And we found that individuals who have a creative interest, whether that creative interest is gardening, music, even listening to music, if they have an interest, they actually use their dreams. So we do have some evidence that anyone who has creative interest uses their dreams.

Lynne Malcolm: James Pagel from the University of Colorado.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, online and on your mobile device. I'm Lynne Malcolm, with the first of a two-part series on dreaming.

Imagine if you could somehow determine the nature of your dreams, perhaps manipulate them so that you have a more relaxing and pleasant sleep.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire:

Richard Wiseman: Well, dream control and manipulation is a fascinating area. And although we're essentially blind, we have our eyes closed during dreams, and even if our eyelids are open we're still not seeing our surroundings, but we do still hear our surroundings, and if we hear some sort of alarm signal or we smell smoke, then that will suddenly wake us up. So it's quite clear that we're monitoring our surroundings. But it's also true that those signals, whether they're auditory or smell based, affect the dream. And so in the past you have people who, for example, have played in very pleasant sounds into the room or have played in very pleasant smells, and then this has given them much nicer dreams.

There was a French researcher around the turn of the last century who ensured that whenever he danced with a beautiful woman at a particular dance, he would get the orchestra to play a certain song. And then in his night he would have a music box that would play that same song in order to create the dream of him dancing with a beautiful woman. So there's been all these kind of eccentric scientists over the years who have tried to manipulate dreams.

Lynne Malcolm: A couple of years ago Richard Wiseman launched a large research project to investigate further how external sounds could determine the types of dreams we have. It uses a mobile phone app called Dream On.

Richard Wiseman: Well, Dream On came from the research of looking at the effect of sounds on dreams. And we wondered whether we could take a smartphone, use it as a platform to deliver those sounds, and so essentially control and hopefully improve the dreams of millions of people around the world.

And it was a very simple idea. Before you went to bed you decided what time you wanted to wake up. You also decided what soundscape you wanted to be played in, so you might think, okay, I want to go for a walk in the woods, in which case I want to hear the birds in the trees and so on; or you might say, I want to go on the beach, and so I want to hear waves lapping against the shore. And then you simply placed your smartphone next to your bed, and in the half an hour or so before you woke up, in trying to target that final dream of the night, it would gently play in your selected soundscape. And then it would wake you up and you would submit a report to us. And from those reports we could see whether or not these sounds actually influenced people's dreams. And we discovered that yes indeed, that's exactly what happened.

Lynne Malcolm: The idea is that the smartphone detects whether you are likely to be dreaming by your movement in bed, assuming that the richest time for dreaming is during REM sleep, when your body is very still. The soundscape of course is barely audible, so it doesn't wake you up.

So, using Dream On, Richard Wiseman and his colleagues collected around 10 million dream reports, making it perhaps the largest dream bank in the world. What have they found out from the data?

Richard Wiseman: What we could see is that when people were playing in those pleasant sounds they really did have a much better dream. And we could see that and take out the role of suggestion, because some of the time we didn't play in any sounds at all. People thought they were getting a lovely nature soundscape and actually it was a placebo condition, there were no sounds. And so we could compare those two types of participant and we could see the impact of the sounds on people, and it's very positive.

Lynne Malcolm: And what sorts of things have you discovered through reading about all those dreams, the most common content that people dream and whether there are differences between what men dream and what women dream, any demographics that you've discovered?

Richard Wiseman: In terms of men and women's dreams it's pretty much the same. Before we carried out the Dream On research we asked men and women what would be their perfect dream or soundscape would they like. And the big difference that emerged there was that men wanted something that was far more sexual than women. So when you ask people what they want it's very different, but the actual dreams themselves tend to be quite similar.

And so actually there is amazing similarity across the world, and I think that's what's remarkable about it, the fact that although we are all different, we're dreaming about the same sorts of things, the sorts of worries and concerns that we all have, because they're very fundamental, I think, to the human psyche.

Lynne Malcolm: So what are you going to be able to do with this research?

Richard Wiseman: One of the things we hope to do is simply make people wake up in a better mood. And that could have real implications because in depression, when people are depressed they dream far more, and those dreams are especially negative. And often because of that they will wake up feeling exhausted even though they have slept actually quite well. And so what I hope is that this might actually form the basis of a kind of dream therapy, that it might help people with some of those mood disorders actually wake up in a better mood and perhaps give them a better night's sleep. And so I think dreams, if they're doing anything, are playing that role, they're just helping us in our everyday lives, and we ignore them and particularly we try and cut down on them at our peril.

Lynne Malcolm: UK Psychologist Richard Wiseman.

Ilana Laps: I believe that dreams are the great forgotten language of our time.

Lynne Malcolm: Ilana Laps is a psychotherapist who now uses her clients' dreams as part of her practice.

Ilana Laps: One of the most useful dreams that we find in therapy is the very first dream that a client brings to therapy. It's actually Irvin Yalom that wrote 'pay attention to the very first dream that a client brings, because it's likely to be a map to your therapy.' And I found that to be really true. One client's given me permission to share his dream, and in his dream, which he had in the week prior to our first session, he'd been strapped very uncomfortably to some power lines, and there were various people from his past shooting him in the back. And the intense pain that he was feeling wasn't actually a physical pain but he described it as an 'immense intensity'. Those are the kind of details that become quite useful later. Later in the dream he is able to exact what he called a 'cold and disconnected revenge' on two of the ringleaders.

So from our very first session we had these very alive themes in the space of a past betrayal, of a serious abuse of power, of quite a painful shame, and also of a simmering capacity for revenge. So these are very difficult places to reach in therapy, and I don't know how long it would have taken us to get there through talk alone. I think even if we had got there let's say months later or had a sense that maybe something like that was going on beyond the surface, those types of reflections would have had much less power and much less impact coming from me than they did coming from him, from his own dreams and his own insights in our very first session.

Lynne Malcolm: So you see that people bring their dreams and they haven't actually censored them or thought more deeply about them, they just lay them on the table and they're there for the pickings, I suppose. Is that the way you use them?

Ilana Laps: That's exactly right. And that word 'uncensored' I think is really important. That's why it's so valuable to use dreams in therapy. But we're often operating out of old stories that aren't really serving us, or where we've become stuck. And Jung said that dreams present their 'clean, unvarnished truth', and now, by looking at what the brain is doing when it's asleep, we actually know that that's true. In general terms the logical, linear, rational part of our brain is powered down when we're dreaming, but everything to do with our emotional life and our motivation and our memory banks are actually wide awake. So what we have is access to an uncensored landscape of memory and emotion. And of course that's the promised land of therapy.

Lynne Malcolm: So do you believe that there are particular general symbols that you can always apply to particular interpretations?

Ilana Laps: Absolutely not. For example, if you were to dream of a white dog and I was to dream of the same white dog it would mean something very different to you and to me. So, for example, you may have had a white dog as a pet, whereas I may have been bitten by one. So your associations may be loyalty and companionship, whereas mine might be being taken by surprise or a betrayal. I do think we can work with our dreams by ourselves, as well, but when we're working alone we do tend to come up against that censor, versus when we're working with a therapist whom we trust, who also may have an inkling of what's going on, we tend to be able to dig a little bit deeper.

Lynne Malcolm: And so how would you distinguish between nightmares, the absolutely frightening, chilling nightmares that people wake up screaming and dreams that aren't so upsetting, are they giving different messages?

Ilana Laps: I'd say that they're both trying to do the same thing, but one's failing and one's succeeding. So let's say a regular dream is attempting to integrate our new experiences, particularly emotional experiences, into the web of memory, and particularly emotional memory. Whereas nightmares tend to deal with traumatic events that we're finding very difficult to integrate. So our emotional circuitry kind of gets overwhelmed and we aren't able to successfully integrate the experience. I read one person say that a nightmare is like a failed dream. You know, every nightmare is really an attempt to integrate a very difficult experience into consciousness.

Lynne Malcolm: And what about recurring dreams and recurring nightmares?

Ilana Laps: I pay particular attention to recurring dreams and recurring nightmares, 'cause these are obviously things that are very important to us. There are things that are potentially in the way to our growth, and in a way they're really tugging on our sleeve.

Lynne Malcolm: And it seems that people's ability to remember their dreams varies quite a lot. Some people are very vivid dreamers and others hardly ever remember them. What's in that difference?

Ilana Laps: There's been research done on this. The single factor that most impacts dream recall is how interested you are in your dreams. So, for example, when clients come and start doing dream work with me, after some time I never hear, 'I don't have a dream this week.' Once they take an interest, once they're writing down their dreams, and particularly once they've worked a dream that has been significant for them, they begin paying attention and their recall increases.

I think we should be paying more attention to the dreams of the elderly and the dreams of the dying. As we do get older our dreams are very instructive around unfinished business. And particularly as we get much older, there are deep psychic processes that prepare us for death, and these often show up in dreams. You know, the fear that we have towards dying, there's often an alternative narrative that shows up in dreaming that is completely ignored in our culture. One of my favourite stories of dying dreams is of an old lady who was quite frightened of dying, and she fell asleep with a candle that was lit on the inside of her window, and in this dream she appeared in that same room with a candle lit inside the window, and suddenly the candle goes out, then it reappears, exactly the same on the other side of the window. And when she woke up she reported that her fear of dying had shifted, and that she believed that there actually was an onward journey.

These dreams are by no means rare. I think there are very profound dreams that come as we age and also as we prepare for death, and I think a lot more research can be done on those.

Lynne Malcolm: Psychotherapist Ilana Laps, and she's developed Dream Lab, an education centre to teach people how to use their dreams, and we'll link to that on our website.

Does UK psychologist Richard Wiseman think that modern life and the way we use technology is having an influence on our sleep and dreams?

Richard Wiseman: Well, there was some research which looked at whether people dream in colour or black and white, and it turns out that people who grew up with black and white television and black and white films tended to dream in black and white. Nowadays obviously we're used to more colourful stimuli. So yes, our surroundings do impact on these things. I think actually the largest impact of technology is just the fact that it's so prevalent, and so people are using smartphones and tablets and computers in the hour or so before they're going to bed. What they're looking at there, whether it's video games or films, are probably influencing our dreams, but also the devices themselves give off blue light, light towards the blue end of the spectrum, which then disrupts the production of melatonin, a sleep producing hormone in the brain, which means that it's harder to get to sleep and it disturbs the quality of the night.

So actually using those devices at all in the hour before you go to bed probably isn't a good idea, because it is going to give you more sort of jagged and disrupted dreams. So we're advising people to put those devices away and spend some time in low light before they go to bed rather than bombarding themselves with blue light. There is a reason why we're spending a third of our time asleep and a quarter of that time dreaming; it is good for our psyche. It is absolutely vital. And I think what's happening at the moment in modern-day living is we're trying to squeeze that time as much as possible. We see it as unproductive down-time. It really isn't. We need to value the night.

Lynne Malcolm: Getting reports from people about their dreams, along with the use of the latest brain imaging technologies, is gradually giving us more insight into the dreaming brain. So could more scientific dream research help us to get a better understanding of the nature of human consciousness itself? James Pagel:

James Pagel: The data from EEG, from all the new scanning systems of fMRI and PET, indicate that what is happening in the brain during both wake and sleep is much more complex than our classic transmission-line view of neuro-anatomy affecting what happens, particularly when we're looking at something like the mind. We're looking at networks such as the default network that are about turning areas off during waking to allow different kinds of consciousness to develop and occur.

An area like dreams, which is so little understood, can adapt to these changes much better than the concept that so many individuals are tied to, whether we're looking at clinical neuro-anatomy associated with surgery, whether we're looking at attempts to handle or understand such concepts as a seizure, which are almost beyond our logical understanding of how our drugs work or how interventions work. So really dreaming is an area that is so wide open that it allows for the incorporation of new data and understanding, where our ties to current neuro-anatomy and neurochemistry are such that it's difficult to bring our new understandings into focus.

Lynne Malcolm: And how does James Pagel see the future of dream research?

James Pagel: The situation currently is really wide open, and when we hit this point in a field where previous constructs have fallen away, the possibilities for understanding are really there with the new technology, with the new possibilities. One of the areas that I've been looking at recently is machine dreaming, the question whether AI systems are already dreaming. There's little question that they meet our criteria for what a dream is, they meet all our definitional criteria. There's better evidence really that machines, AI systems, are dreaming, than there is that animals are dreaming that are not human.

Lynne Malcolm: Well, there's a space to keep an eye on; dreaming machines! James Pagel from the University of Colorado.

Next week we explore the world of lucid dreaming, that compelling space between dreams and reality. Don't miss it. In the meantime, we'd love to hear about your dreams and how they influence your life. Go to our webpage and send us an email, leave a comment, or tweet using the hashtag #rndreams. And post comments or even photos on the All in the Mind Facebook page to express your dream world.

We'll feature some of your contributions in articles on the RN website. But I'm afraid we can't offer to interpret your dreams, we'd be up all night!

Production today by Diane Dean and Judy Rapley. I'm Lynne Malcolm. Until next week, sweet dreams.

Guests

Associate Professor James Pagel

University of Colorado School of MedicineRocky Mountain Sleep Disorders Clinic

Ilana Laps

PsychotherapistFounder of Dream Lab

Professor Richard Wiseman

Professor of the Public Understanding of ScienceUniversity of Hertfordshire United Kingdom

Further Information

Credits

Comments (2)

Darrell :

20 Jan 2015 12:47:43pm

I recently had a striking dream where I woke up as if I was dead.. ie. the Spirit or Soul lives beyond or apart from the physical body.. I also took this powerful dream as a striking symbol of my awakening to my deeper Soul Self.. Or of waking up the the night or Lunar realm of the Soul, or psyche's world, the world of the deep imagination, ie. awakening to the deep poetic basis of mind.. The poasis..

And meanwhile as I began listening to this program I also had two books with me, 'The Inner Sky' by Steven Forrest, & James Hillman's book 'The Dream & the Underworld'.. beginning with the quote,

"The dread & resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to devling too deeply into Oneself, is at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades."

Carl Jung'Psychology & Alchemy

And by the way let us recount our dreams..

"I have had a most rare vision.. a dream, past the wit of man to say what my dream was"..

Ray Butler :

20 Jan 2015 10:48:02pm

The sceptic in me considers dreams to be the product of our mind processing information that we attain during our waking state, this is not necessarily information that we are aware of by focusing, but also peripheral information that we are not consciously paying attention to at the time.

Something like autism I believe is a case of where the afflicted has not focus mechanism, they absorb all stimuli equally, so listening to mother talk at the same time as the T.V is on can become an overload to their senses and they may not really process either effectively.

But as an Aboriginal by cultural identity and somewhat by heritage, I embrace the Dreaming; my interpretation is that there is a phenomenal world and a spiritual or energy world, chemical memory of the brain is phenomenal but the energy realm is disconnected from it. The Dreaming is a bridge between these two states of existence, with a foot in one and a foot in the other, the Dreaming is a case of the two speaking to each other, your chemical mind is interpreting the other reality.

Once upon a time the energy realm was alone but through concentrative powers and constructive relationships the phenomenal world was born from it.